With Eyes Closed
by Kurissyma san Tybalt
Summary: I wished that she would spare me the sight of those tears for my own selfish reasons, for the sake of my own selfish heart, which yearned to be whole." Bear/BT, Requested by Aranthi-Evenstar on DeviantArt


AN// Written for Aranthi-Evenstar on DeviantArt, by special request.

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**_With Eyes Closed: A Bear and BT story_**

It was never the same seeing that woman in the World. At first I thought that it must be the same with everyone: it must be equally difficult to draw the connection between any person's PC and their real life forms. But then I met An Shoji, who was 'Tsukasa', and in essence she was exactly how I imagined her to be: she had the same ideas and notions and spoke them with the same clarity, and she had the same voice. She was essentially _Tsukasa_. Through An, I met Mariko Misono, who was 'Subaru' and though it was something of a shock to see such a renowned Heavy Axewoman confined to a wheelchair it was still _Subaru_ that I was seeing, at least! …But Machiko… Machiko was not BT.

Machiko's tongue was not so sharp as BT's, her laugh was not so _infrequent_ as BT's. Machiko seemed, on the whole, a lot _happier_ than BT… when she was happy. But then I saw her cry.

Because Machiko's tone was not so firm as BT's, nor her tears so easily hidden as BT's. Machiko, I soon found, was a real woman, and she hurt the way that a real woman did, and that took some getting used to: the fact that my rock in "the World" was, in my world, where I was so at home and comfortable, a real woman.

I never flattered myself to think that that woman wrote to me because she loved me, nor even because she _liked_ me. Rather, I simply believed that she wrote to me because she had no one else to write to, and I thought that for a woman so beautiful to be so alone was the greatest injustice in the world.

Machiko had issues in the real world. Real issues. These issues never seemed quite so terrible in 'the World,' but then again, I never did see 'BT' cry. These issues took on a whole new weight when Machiko cried them to me.

Machiko didn't like to cry in front of others, but she sometimes made that special exception for me, and it made me feel awful to wish that she wouldn't—that she would spare me the sight of those tears for my own selfish reasons, for the sake of my own selfish heart, which yearned to be whole.

The letters began as a result of this. Machiko was more intuitive than BT—perhaps she sensed my discomfort at seeing her so completely undone. She would write to me when she was feeling sad and I would reply. As a writer, I felt myself best expressed on paper after all, and so it worked well for me, better, perhaps, than it worked for her.

After the letters began, the tears stopped almost completely, and while I was glad of that, I was never naïve enough to believe that the tears didn't happen again the moment I turned my back.

Then one day she e-mailed me, quite simply, that she'd had enough.

Machiko and I, we never e-mailed. We wrote on paper. E-mail was far too impersonal, and it blurred too many lines between real life and "the World." Neither Machiko nor BT had ever liked to see those lines blurred.

But that day it was simple. Straight out. A two second email that arrived almost immediately after it was sent.

"_I've had enough, Sa/Kuma-san."_

Sa/Kuma-san.

She was divorcing me by both my given name (Sakuma Ryo, in the Japanese order of surname, Christian name), and by my identity in the world: Kuma-san. Mr Bear. And I knew by our accumulated correspondences that this was likely not the only thing she had given up on lately.

I wrote back to her promptly.

"_I haven't."_

I called her cell phone then, and I made her talk to me as I drove, as quickly as I was able, toward her house. She wasn't in the mood to talk at first, so I contented myself with listening to her breathe. But why did she have to live so far away?

Half an hour later she said to me, "Sakuma-san, you're coming here, aren't you?"

And I replied, "Of course," because it was obvious. I heard her sigh half-hearted relief then, and I sighed the same relief, that she would wait for me.

For the simple reason of distance, Machiko and I often met and talked in "the World", but when she had something important to talk about, she always refused. "This world and 'The World' are not so different," she told me once. "The divide is what you make it." Machiko defends her divide with her heart. "Games are frivolous by nature," she says. "If you talk too seriously, you stop playing." I was always chastised for this.

When we met in the real world, we usually met halfway, also because of the physical distance between us. It would be too easy, of course, if she had turned out to live down the road from me—she had to live almost two hours away, and more than that in the rush hour traffic that I was now faced by. This would be only the second or third time I had set foot in her home. I wished it could have been under better circumstances.

As I drove, I concentrated very hard on the sound of her breathing and I thought about what it meant to me, why the sound comforted me so. There were many reasons that came to mind, but one presented itself particularly strongly at the forefront of my mind. Something also told me that this was the reason I was willing to drive so far for her on such a vague whim, and why I was willing to pay a two-hour mobile-to-landline phone bill as I did so.

About ten minutes from her place, I heard sobs begin to fill the relative silence from her end of the line—the silence that had been smothering me for the past half hour or so—and my heart contracted at the sound. It had been weeks since I had heard her cry, but as I began to realise more and more now, the effectiveness of the letter writing system was almost completely one-sided. For an author like me it was a lot easier, but for Machiko it was not. I had recognised this from the beginning, so why hadn't I acted on it?

The tears hurt all the more now, having not heard them the past few weeks, and I found myself easing the accelerator down a little further than I probably should have. Come on… five more minutes.

Those five minutes were as much an eternity for me as I'm sure they must have been for her and when finally, two hours and fifteen minutes after that original e-mail was sent, I arrived on her street, it didn't quite seem real, and it wasn't until I had reached her door and rung the bell that I realised I wasn't even sure what to say.

'Don't do anything stupid, Machiko! I love you!' …Ridiculous, isn't it? Not only was that _far_ too much of a cliché for me, but when I thought about it honestly, a confession of love from a 47-year-old friend is not likely to be encouraging for an ex-model in her late twenties… No, I certainly couldn't say that…

However, all too soon the door was opened and there, right in front of me, was the face that I had missed so much the past few weeks, when in its place I had found only fickle, unsmiling paper, and though her tears almost moved me to tears of my own, I found that seeing her face again had a greater impact on me than I would have expected, and so I stood there—unable to move, unable to speak—in her doorway, and I found her staring at me with the same dumbfounded look. You would have thought that she had had moments rather than hours to contemplate my arrival. You would have thought the same of me.

"Machi-chan," I said eventually, and it sounded more like a shuddering breath than her name. She cocked her head to one side and she stepped out of the doorway. I walked inside and I sat down on her bed, near her terminal, leaving the only chair in the room free for her to sit on. She wouldn't sit. Instead, she turned her attention to the terminal.

"The most ridiculous thing just happened, Bear," she told me, and her voice was a mixture between a laugh and a sob.

She didn't tell me what 'the most ridiculous thing' was and I didn't ask her, but I listened to her as she groused about her life in the usual way, and when she finished, I held her a little closer than usual—comforting her in the only way I could just then.

Because though Bear could quote philosophers and poets to the end of the earth, and Ryo Sakuma could write them into a speech prettier and more comforting than a winter bloom, _I_ could deliver neither comfort with that woman standing so close as she was then. Because, as per usual, the clumsy, heavy-handed Sa/Kuma-san was speechless in her presence.

And yet to her, it seemed presence alone that made all the difference.


End file.
